ET View: No-confidence motion will draw battle lines for 2019

ET Bureau|

Jul 18, 2018, 04.05 PM IST

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The BJP has more than enough numbers in Parliament to wade through this floor test.

Parliament has admitted a confidence vote proposed by TDP, asking why Andhra Pradesh should not get tax sops guaranteed to ‘special category states’. Well, Andhra Pradesh is not 'tribal', or 'inaccessible, or linguistically or ethnically ‘backward’. And so it doesn't qualify. But the TDP-triggered vote is a political stance.

The BJP has more than enough numbers in Parliament to wade through this floor test. But in this shaking of the tree, t will become evident where non-BJP parties stand prior to the 2019 general elections. Essentially, who will be non-BJP and who anti-BJP going into the polls.

Even as the Opposition and the government are working out what the issues up for debate will be in Parliament, some issues to be placed on the table are obvious. And none is more obvious than the matter which the Supreme Court commented on only this week as a serious problem being played out across the country: lynch mobs. Demanding for a new law aside, the issue of implementing present laws -- or, rather the lack of implementation -- is going to be debated with passion, and one sincerely hopes with reason, in Parliament during the next few days.

It is the job of state governments -- and 22 of the 29 states are BIP-ruled -- to crack down on such unchecked vigilantism, since law is a state subject. A diktat from Delhi to states should suffice. We await that diktat from GoI in this monsoon session.